history of economics thought

MACROBUTTON DoFieldClick [Student 's Name]

MACROBUTTON DoFieldClick [Instructor 's Name]

MACROBUTTON DoFieldClick [Course Title]

DATE \ "d MMMM yyyy " 3 August 2010

A Brief History of Economics

1 : Marx and Materialism

Through his use of dialectical materialism , Marx not only changed the history of economic thought , but found great illumination for himself regarding the bonds of human society . The concept that seems relatively simple in today 's complex economic world was utterly revolutionary in the time of Marx : people develop their ideas about the world (and thereby , their ideas

for how society should be organized and stratified based on the material aspects of their lives . It was an elegant extension of basic Marxist theory : capitalism , according to Marx , is interested in offering naked materialism as a kind of booby prize to make up for the means of production being taken away from the people . If the people can no longer work for themselves and no longer work at perfecting their own craft as individuals , then , as Marx correctly deduced , people would require something to validate their work . This became the center of capitalism , as Marx understood it : materialism exists as a kind of justification for capitalism , and since materialism has permeated our culture to such an extreme degree , eventually social orders began to revolve around it . Hence , what capitalism serves as the cause of what Marx saw as nothing less than ongoing class warfare . It is interesting to note that Marx believed a violent revolution on the part of the...